Tsila: the social construction of the enemy. Youth marginality and ethnic stigma before the Tigray war

This collections showcases contemporary research on multiple youth deprivation of personal isolation, social hardship, gender and ethnic discrimination and social stigma, drawing on findings of empirical studies that seek to explore the critical intersections of social class, gender and ethnic identities.

ABSTRACT: The situation, agency, and actions of the youth remain central to the analyses of political, socioeconomic, and cultural dynamics of postwar Sierra Leone. This article returns to the youth question twenty years after the end of the war in Sierra Leone in order to understand the differing experiences that animate youth sociopolitical and economic reality in the country. It focuses specifically on the experiences of the present generation of youth, the spaces they inhabit, and what their experiences teach us about postwar peacebuilding in Sierra Leone. Using data collected through interviews, surveys, and focus group discussions from over 562 youth and other actors, between January 2019 and November 2022, this article argues that a significant proportion of the country's youth remain marginalized in society. These youth continue to deploy coping strategies, including creation of alternative social spaces, expressive popular culture, drugs and gangs, and migration to deal with their marginality. Significantly a proportion of marginalized youth remain trapped in cycles of violence as they clash with state security forces.

Historical narratives help construct social identities, which are maintained through differentiation between in-groups and "others." In this article, we contend that Fatima Besnaci-Lancou's texts, as well as her reconciliation work—in which she enjoins Beurs and Harkis' offspring to write a new, inclusive, polyphonic narrative of the Algerian War—are an example of the positive use of textually mediated identity (re)construction. Her work suggests the possibility of implementing a moderate politics of empathetic recognition of the (often migration-related) memories of "others" so as to reinforce French national belongingness.

Names have long been regarded as symbols of the self and components of identity formation, signifying biography, social place, and collective histories. They allow the expression of connection and disconnection to families, communities, collectives, and their related narrative of social history. A large body of research documents the role of names in the social construction of identity, and more recently, the power of naming to serve as a form of social control and political action. A range of procedures connects naming practices to a person’s civil status. There are those who have no right to assert a name for themselves, since under specific political-historical circumstances, powerful others have appropriated that right. This was the case for slaves, who got their names from their enslavers, or more commonly today migrants, whose names are casually distorted by official administrators unable or unwilling to spell them properly. Likewise, illegal immigrants or excluded social actors are at times deprived of the right to be registered under their names in official records. And then there are those who have the power to insist on self-naming, despite social expectations that they would be named by others (e.g., married women who refuse to take their husbands’ names).KeywordsMarried WomanModern FamilyBirth FamilyNaming PracticeLatin American StateThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Getting Personal: The Art of Autoethnography

History has long been recognised as a strategic and organisational resource. However, until recently, the advantage conferred by history was attributed to a firm’s ability to accumulate heterogeneous resources or develop opaque practices. In contrast, we argue that the advantage history confers on organisations is based on understanding when the knowledge of the past is referenced and the reasons why it is strategically communicated. We argue that managers package this knowledge in historical narratives to address particular organisational concerns and audiences. As well, we show that different historical narratives are produced with the goal of achieving different organisational outcomes. The success of an organisation is thus dependent on the ability of its managers to skilfully develop historical narratives that create a strategic advantage.

In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and formal interviews from a community study in Rockdale County, Georgia, to illustrate the social construction of place-based identity within the rural-urban interface. Given decades of growth and expansion in metro Atlanta, Rockdale has become an object lesson of the boundary shifting and crossing typical of places located along the rural-urban fringe. A sustained pattern of demographic and ecological change in Rockdale has resulted in a lack of consensus about how to imagine the community’s location on the rural-urban continuum. I show how symbolic and social boundaries between urbanity and rurality are blurred within the community as residents draw on local resources to construct alternatively urban, suburban, and rural identities. Additionally, I illustrate how local boosters take advantage of this blurriness to portray Rockdale County as a “perfectly positioned” community and how community members disregard the official rural-urban boundaries of governments or scholars and instead invest their own imagined boundaries with significant meaning.

In April 1861, a local newspaper commented favourably on permission being granted to allow the policemen of Newcastle upon Tyne to wear moustaches, and on the moustaches they subsequently grew. The article demonstrates that these moustaches had an important role to play in the visual construction and performance of social, collective, and professional identities for individual members of the police force in Newcastle in 1861. It suggests that in requesting permission, acting upon it, and in the type of facial hair that they grew, the policemen revealed how they saw themselves, and how they wanted to be seen. This offers an opportunity to hear a voice often excluded from historical narratives, that of the ‘ordinary’ policemen in the provinces, exercising an agency that might be unexpected in the mid-nineteenth century. The article argues that their moustaches enabled Newcastle’s policemen to express a sense of belonging to their local force and their awareness of being part of a larger, nationwide phenomenon, evidence of the development of a police culture with a positive and specifically fashioned self-image. As such, it contributes an unusual perspective on police professionalisation and identity in an important period of change.

Purpose: School discipline reformers have presumed that such work is largely a technical task, emphasizing discrete changes to discipline policies and protocols. Yet prior theory and research suggest that emphasizing technical changes may overlook additional and important aspects of reform, namely, the normative and political dimensions within which technical aspects are embedded. Although this earlier work appears relevant to contemporary school discipline reform, the extent to which this theory extends to school discipline remains unestablished. The purpose of this article is to show how this earlier line of theory extends to the topic of school discipline. Method: We draw on data collected as part of a qualitative study in which we conducted semistructured interviews and focus groups with 198 educators from 33 public schools on the topic of school discipline. We applied an equity-minded reform theory to examine technical, normative, and political dimensions of school discipline. Findings and Implications: We found the technical dimension of school discipline was characterized by educators’ strategic use of school resources and capacity building; normative conditions that supported conflict prevention and increased responsibility; and political dynamics in which administrators shifted power to encourage more inclusive discipline strategies. Furthermore, using this model illuminated interrelationships between dimensions, suggesting that unidimensional models—and their related reforms—may overlook nuances of this important reform issue. This theoretical extension provides a more holistic conceptualization than currently used in reform efforts, contributes to earlier lines of scholarship, and opens up new avenues of future inquiry.

This study examines the influence of political communication strategies on public perception and understanding of godfatherism and godson conflicts in Nigeria. The primary objective is to analyze how media framing, social media, and political rhetoric shape public attitudes towards these political dynamics. The study is grounded in the framing and agenda-setting theories, which explores how media and communication strategies influence and shape public interpretation of political issues through framing and constant focus on such issues. A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining qualitative content analysis of media reports and interviews with political analysts, alongside a quantitative survey of public opinions. Findings reveal that traditional media, particularly news outlets aligned with political figures, frame godfatherism as either a stabilizing force or a corrupt practice, significantly influencing public opinion. Social media platforms also contribute to the spread of misinformation, intensifying partisan divides. Politicians' strategic use of campaign messages further polarizes views, with some presenting godfatherism as beneficial while others critique it as detrimental to democracy. The study concludes that political communication plays a pivotal role in shaping public understanding of godfatherism, either fostering informed engagement or reinforcing apathy. It recommends promoting media literacy, encouraging independent journalism, and fostering a more transparent political discourse to reduce the negative effects of biased political narratives.

The Italo-Ethiopian war (1935–6) had a profoundly destabilising effect internationally and can be regarded as one of the events that led to the outbreak of the Second World War. Benito Mussolini's occupation of the country (then known as Abyssinia) was facilitated by the massive use of air power and chemical weapons – in ways that at the time were still unprecedented. Mussolini's chemical war, occurring in a country at the periphery of geopolitical spheres of interest, has remained marginal to established historical narratives, rendering it anachronistically topical to today's politics of memory. By examining two films based on archival film footage, respectively Lutz Becker's documentary The Lion of Judah, War in Ethiopia 1935–1936 (1975) and Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi's video work Barbaric Land ( Paese barbaro, 2013), this article considers the significance of the moving image as a trace of events that have mostly remained visually undocumented and questions its relevance vis à vis today's mediated warfare and the ethics of images.

Facing intense global competition and pressure from public authorities, several universities in Europe have engaged in merger and concentration processes. Drawing on two in-depth case studies, this paper considers university mergers as an opportunity to explore the processes involved in the creation of a new organizational structure. In line with recent scholarly calls to revisit the notion of organizational design, we combine insights from three different research streams to address the functional, political, and institutional dynamics that shaped the organizational architecture of the merged universities. Two main results are presented and discussed. First, although these mergers were initiated largely in response to the diffusion of new global institutional scripts, these scripts had little influence on organizational design: deeply institutionalized local scripts prevailed over global mimetic pressures. Second, while these institutional scripts provided many of the basic building blocks of the new universities, in both cases their design was also heavily shaped by time pressures and power games. While a few powerful actors used the merger as an opportunity to promote their own reform agenda, some of the key features of the two merged universities stemmed from choices by exclusion, whose primary aim was the avoidance of conflicts.

Recently, the Internet has become the focus of immense speculation regarding the social construction of identity and cultural “authenticity.” However, examinations of virtual communities such as blogs, multiuser domains, and chat rooms have largely ignored nonwhite, especially African American, virtual communities (VCs). Through participant observation, content analysis, and personal interviews, this article analyzes a VC dedicated to members of African American fraternities and sororities, generally referred to as black Greek letter organizations (BGLOs). Findings show that BGLO virtual authenticity is accomplished via (1) the making of “brothers” and “others” based on symbolic boundaries of exclusion and inclusion and (2) the deployment of themes of resistance based on emotions of both sufferance and success. Implications suggest that interrogations of how virtuality constrains and enables processes of “authentic” racial identity formation as well as configurations of racist narratives and ideologies can yield added insights regarding the raced character of structure/agency, symbolic boundaries, and the social use of emotions.

Names and labels attributed to persons with albinism (PWA) in East, Central, and West Africa, reflect deeply rooted cultural beliefs, superstitions, and etiological and historical narratives. In these regions, the identity of the black PWA differs by his/her black/white duality – Black but not black, white but not White. Using Labelling and Symbolic Interactionism frameworks, we address three questions: (i) How are PWA named and labelled across East, Central, and West Africa? (ii) How can we categorise the predominant names and labels? (iii) How do these names and labels reflect socio-cultural conceptions, affect behaviour towards PWA, and contribute to the external construction of the identity of PWA? Principal categories emerge: supernatural affiliation, pigmentation, association with economic capital, vegetal and earth affiliations, zoosemic metaphors, and ambiguous/undetermined labels. These categories reflect cultural sentiments ranging from adulation to ostracisation, influencing social behaviour and identity construction. While some cultures regard PWA as celestial entities, others link them to curses or tragedy. Labels that commodify PWA render them targets for exploitation and violence, while vegetal, zoosemic, and ambiguous terminology contribute to alienation and identity crisis. This research demonstrates how cultural constructs of identity through language reinforce stigma and prejudice against PWA, worsening their social marginalisation.

Home-based care volunteer (HBCV) identity and how it is shaped was the main focus of the study. Fifteen HBCVs were interviewed about their work and personal life stories and then interviewed reflectively using a narrative interviewing style. Specific attention was paid to contextual meta-narratives and social field narratives in understanding the women's stories. Findings indicate that social field narratives of the women's stories were dominated by negative aspects of gender, poverty and socio-political factors. These were seen to coincide with the ‘feminisation of responsibility’ in this context effectively coercing the women into agency which manifested as their home-based care work. Meta-narratives influencing the women's lives were dominated by stories of communal motherhood, aspirations to service-oriented work and religious beliefs and commitment. The question of how it is possible for women who are seemingly constrained by oppressive narratives to voluntarily engage in community participation was answered in the women's personal life stories about being compassionate, hopeful, helpful and ambitious and having initiative. These characteristics collectively pointed to personal agency. Exploring connections between the different aspects of identity and context revealed that the women made sense of their community participation through their personal identities as strong and loving mothers. Connections between volunteer personal identity, agency and volunteer group identity were explored to make sense of the link between HBCV identity and volunteerism. The mother identity, encompassing personal agency (strength or power) and love (the meta-narrative of communal motherly love), was salient in influencing community participation of the group.